


peace

by captainodonewithyou



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:02:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25493563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainodonewithyou/pseuds/captainodonewithyou
Summary: prompt response. insp from peace by t swift.
Relationships: Skye | Daisy Johnson & Daniel Sousa
Comments: 9
Kudos: 67





	peace

She can’t stop painting the walls. They were all grey, when she moved in. If Daisy knew anything about renting apartments, her want list for this one may have included something like “doesn’t look like a bunker” in addition to the only other detail she cared about — which had been proximity to the house Jemma bought. Unfortunately, apartment renting was not a life skill taught either by the nuns or by SHIELD. So after closing the deal, she’d come to the place with her new keys, her backpack, and one single box of belongings. There were no furnishings yet, and she sat in the middle of the empty would-be living room, staring at the dark walls.

She wished someone would have told her it would be so quiet.

When she couldn’t sit any longer she went to open the blinds. They were jammed, and old, and bunker-y. She sent soft vibrations through the screws holding up the blinds, until the entire contraption fell to the carpet with a muffled clunk. The glow of the streetlights streamed in to add a new shade of beige to the darkness.

Someone, a neighbor, was walking their lab down the sidewalk. It was this that made her pulse race and her heart constrict. It was all too still, too quiet. Too normal.

She called Sousa— he was getting better at the phone, but still refused to text — on principle, he said.

“Did you guys like, paint shit? In the dark ages?”

“Did we… paint?”

“Like, walls.”

“Sure.”

“Wanna come help me paint mine?”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“On my way.”

That first night, they drove to the hardware store together. Sousa hovered at her shoulder while she fingered through the paint swatches. She had never done anything like it before, and the choices were overwhelming.

“You should do yellow,” Sousa offered unhelpfully.

Daisy wrinkled her nose.

“Yellow?”

“I like yellow,” he defended, but he was grinning softly in defeat. “Reminds me of you.”

She ended up picking a purply blue called “french lavender”. While the paint mixed they got brushes and pans and a few other tools that the employee who finally wore them down with his offers of “help” directed them to. Sousa listened intently to the man’s painting tips, brow furrowed and folded. Daisy wanted to tell him to relax — it wasn’t that big of a deal. But she didn’t. She didn’t even say it when they got back to her apartment, and he carefully taped the molding as directed — even though it was going to double their work time.

With him around, the quiet wasn’t so bad. She gave him her phone to play Spotify — he had put up with only so much of her music before he put his foot down and insisted that for every new artist she introduced him to, he got to introduce her to some of his music. It was an easy pattern for them to fall into, trading off turns. She wasn’t sure if it really was his turn tonight. It didn’t matter.

It was past 1AM when they finished. He had opened the window at some point along the way, and the playlist had long since died out. Warm night air mingled with the fresh scent of paint. She was lying on her back on the carpet beside him, playing absently with his calloused fingers, rested on her stomach. Laying there with him, staring up at their wall — it was perfect.

When she woke with warm sunshine streaming over them, her head curled into the warm, steady rise and fall of his chest, his breath in her hair, their fingers still tangled — it was perfect then, too.

After she started moving in furniture, she realized she hated “french lavender”.

And so it began. “French lavender”, turned to “Robin’s egg blue”. “Robin’s egg blue”, turned to “cotton white”.

“Your walls are going to start peeling off in rainbows,” Simmons muttered whenever Daisy asked her opinion on different swatches, “honestly, Daisy, no one repaints this much. Daniel, tell her no one paints this much.”

She can’t stop herself — it still doesn’t feel right. She practically avoids the apartment most days. The quiet emptiness is like electricity in her veins. The stillness makes her heart pound in anticipation. She can’t relax. When the wall looks right — then, she’ll be able to breath.

She has a bed now, and a couch, and a table and chairs — plenty of things to sit on, but she sits on the floor a lot anyway, staring at the wall. Mostly uninterrupted. So she is surprised when her phone rings.

“Daniel?”

“Can I come over?”

They are firmly “dating” now. It feels like a silly word for it, like “boyfriend” seems like a silly word for him — this man that she’s plucked out of time. These words don’t fit right, they don’t quite match - a shade off from whatever it is that they are.

When she opens her door to him, she immediately notices the can of paint.

“Just give me a chance,” he defends, brushing a kiss to her forehead above her raised eyebrows as he steps over the threshold.

“Jemma put you up to this,” she gives in dry response, and he laughs.

“Nope, all me.”

“I’m not going to like it.”

“That’s fine.”

He moves past her into the living room and is already heaving the couch back away from the currently dark blue wall when she follows behind him, arms crossed over her chest. She makes no move to help him — in fact, she feels frustration bubbling up in her chest, threatening to take hold.

“Stop,” she says, but it is under her breath and he doesn’t hear over his own heaving of the couch. “Daniel,” she says louder now, “stop.”

“Daisy-“

“Dammit, just…” her breath catches, “just stop.”

She means to turn on her heel and storm out of the room, but she feels all of a sudden like the wind has been knocked full out of her, and all she can do is stand perfectly still searching to get her breath back.

Daniel has stopped now, and he stares across the room at her with a furrowed brow and eyes full of worry.

“Daisy,” he mutters, taking a few steps closer to her. “What’s wrong?”

She is still focusing on her breathing, because if she doesn’t she doesn't know what she'll say. She squeezes her eyes closed tight and counts as she breaths in, counts as she breaths out. Then, she carefully unclenches her teeth to speak.

“I’m not going to like it,” she says, enunciating each word carefully and fighting to remain steady.

“So then we’ll paint it again. Relax,” his eyes are soft and worried, “its not that big of a deal — what is this about?”

Her eyes are burning now. It isn’t the paint, of course it isn’t. But she doesn’t know how to put into words what it is.

“I don’t… this isn’t… fuck,” she is falling out of her own control now, a stray tear escaping her eyes and plummeting down her cheek. Daniel is close enough to mindlessly thumb it away.

“I lived in a van — a car,” she finally manages, “with carpet for walls. This,” she waves wildly around them, and a couple more tears knock themselves loose, “god, I don’t know what this is. I don't know how to be like this. It is just so…” a sob is strangling her, “It is all so goddamn quiet that I can’t breathe.”

When the sobs finally do overcome her, he is already holding her tight against him, burying a kiss on top of her head.

She wants this, wants him, wants normal walls that don’t feel like they are strangling her.

“After the war,” he says into her hair, “I slept on the floor. For… longer than I care to admit.”

He hesitates. Holds her tighter. She presses her forehead against his shoulder, breathes his warm sunshine-y scent, focuses on re-steadying herself.

“I was used to a sleeping bag on the rocks, at best. My bed… I felt like I was drowning in it.”

Steady enough now, she pushes back off of him and takes a step back rubbing roughly at her eyes.

“I wasn’t a soldier.”

“Yes, you were.”

The certainty of his words, the sureness in his eyes, stills her.

“And no one, least of all me, expects you to just… move on. Okay?”

She presses her lips together and breathes in slowly, counting. Then out.

“It is chaos,” she finally manages, voice still cracking. “This place is chaos, I can’t help it, I can’t stop it. I just… I want it to be peaceful and quiet and I want you to be here and not worrying about if I’m having another goddamn psychotic break about the color of the wall. But I’m never going to stop having psychotic breaks about dumb shit like the color of the walls.”

He smiles, just a little twitch of the corner of his lip, shaking his head ever so slightly.

“Daisy, I don’t give a damn about the walls. I just want to be with you.”

“I just want…” To have something normal? To give him something normal? He is watching her with those wide, dark eyes, his perpetually furrowed brow. The silence sits comfortably now, that its between them. Her heart gives a stutter. “I just want to be with you, too.”

(He brought "Daisy Yellow", and a flyer from their trip to the museum a few weeks prior. They move the couch and use the map of the constellations on the flyer to begin stenciling bright yellow stars into the deep ocean blue. She is sock-footed on the arm of the couch working on the upper corner, and he is sitting below her, so that when she sinks to a seat to dab more paint onto her brush, his head lolls comfortably backwards against her thigh.

Yellow paint has dried into her fingers, she notices as she runs a hand through his soft curls.

“We’re never going to finish this,” she says, eyeing the hundreds of thousands of pinpricks of stars on the flyer they are trying to emulate.

He laughs, low and deep.

“No rush.”

She slips off the arm of the couch, settling onto the floor beside him. It is still, and silent, and peaceful.

“Maybe you should stick around. For the wall.”

Soft — his eyes staring back at hers, the carpet under her socked toes, his lips against hers, the couch pressing into their backs, his hair tangled in her fingers.

“Okay.”)


End file.
